Month: November 2015

I’m thankful for my wife of 21 years. Her happiness is my life’s meaning.

I’m thankful, as I’ve always been, that I was born in, and continue to live in, the United States of America — still the freest nation on earth, which tells you something about the rest of the world, sadly.

I’m thankful to God for sending His son to show us that forgiveness is the key to everlasting life, that repentance is the key to forgiveness, and we are all His beloved children.

I wasn’t quite two years old when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, so I remember it only from accounts by others — including my mother who recounted a tale that has stayed with me ever since.

Seems that on that Friday, someone asked a group of acquaintances, “Did you hear the good news?” And yes, he was referring to the events in Dallas. My mother’s reaction to the question would have been colored by her being Irish Catholic and, at the time, still a Democrat. But in telling the story she made it clear that domestic political differences were no excuse, regardless.

That lesson is one of the reasons my curse on President Obama is that he live to be 150 without ever being physically harmed for his official misdeeds; what I want is for him to spend 100 years in excellent health known as the worst president ever, and fully aware of it.

This post at Instapundit by Elizabeth Price Foley illustrates a big part of the reason for then-President George W. Bush’s concerns over anti-Islam backlash in the wake of 9/11. According to the Washington Post,

In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.

The video of Palestinians cheering and dancing and passing out candy on the West Bank was bad enough, but to celebrate an attack on America, while living on American soil, is beyond bad manners. The U.S. would have been justified in investigating the people in question for treason, if citizens — or deporting them, if not.

After Paris, I would advise any Muslim in America to join the armed forces if eligible, for the express purpose of going overseas to fight ISIS. If they do so sincerely, and exhibit valor on behalf of America and civilization in general, those that don’t hold U.S. citizenship can be fast-tracked.

Those who enlist dishonestly will receive free airlift to the Middle East where they can desert and join up with the enemy — if they aren’t shot on sight while deserting.

We went along with Bush’s pleas because he had credibility among the great mass of the people at the time. Obama has never had that, and his idea of a plea for calm is to sneer and call names. All the ugliness Bush helped avert, will fit right in with Obama’s New Normal™.

I’m serious: right now the safest place for young Muslim men is in a military uniform, on a battlefield thousands of miles from American shores. The law may prohibit racial profiling, but few murder victims are ever comforted by the fact their killers broke the law.

This morning the weather station out there in the field (where Roger Daltrey fights for his meals) (it can be a spectacular sight, by the way) recorded a low temperature of 28.7°F, aided by a dew point of 24.

I’d have to rummage the archives to see when was the earliest subfreezing temp reported here since we moved in, and there would only be three other records in the sample so it wouldn’t say much.

The temperature this morning at McGehee’s Freehold bottomed out at (drum roll, please) 32.1°F.

Meanwhile, in Interior Alaska (where I lived for five years two decades ago and don’t you forget it) they’ve already had subzero temperatures. I doubt this year will match 1994, when Fairbanks hit -45°F. on Thanksgiving Day, the earliest recorded such cold snap at the time. That was the day someone backed into the rear bumper on my 1993 Ford Escort wagon and it … shattered.

In the 16 years I’ve lived here in subtropical west Georgia, we have more or less regularly had winter temperatures in the teens, and at least once I seem to recall even single digits. For, like, a minute.

Our neighborhood landscape still isn’t quite in full winter mode yet, there are still some leaves on some of the trees that I can see out my window. But I think today I will change my various background images to a winter scene. Including here.